How ANNOYING!

[turbotiber]

I went to a my lfs here called Maskota (means pet in Spanish) and I was looking around at their bettas and one of them was breathing rapidly and just laying at the bottome of a tiny bowl. I told him his betta was sick and he said "Oh yeah" and removed it to let it die cause the medication that they have is for big gallon tanks (so he said). Then I swished over to another counter and almost half of the bettas had fin rot and the rest had REALLY dirty water. They were in a place where anyone and probably everyone stuck their dirty finger in the water.

Then at another place this guy had a dead betta. When I asked him why the betta had died the guy said "Oh I think it's because he forgot to feed him today" That was before I knew a betta could die of starvation after like 4 weeks. AND to top it all off he had a dead female betta almost down to the skeleton cause the other girls were eating her

Places like these make me mad... I can understand fish deaths because of stress and disease... but sheesh, remove them as quickly as possible from the tank before they get eaten by the other fish and worse infect them!

 

[Inchworm]

Hi Zenn

First, I want to say how much I enjoyed reading about your trials and tribulations at the local PETCO store.

It has often seemed to me that we take an awful lot of nonsense from chain lfs that we would never take from any other kind of store. Can you imagine going into a store to buy a washing machine and having some clerk insist that a dryer was a washing machine? Or tell you that they don't sell them when you see them right there? It would never happen. Why should it be different with fish?

I've long thought that this should be treated as a consumer issue, but it seems that does not happen. In the US, for example, there is some law that states that if something is labeled at one price, that's the price it is. I've actually had people running to the back of the store to look at the price of a can of vegetables, on a shelf in the supermarket, and bought things at a lower price than they really were because of that. But even I would cut them some slack at the lfs. I wonder why?

On the other hand, I want to say a good word about these stores. They are not all bad; they are as good as the employees that work there at any given time. It's too bad that the good ones move on too soon. Last week I went into a Petland Discounts store and one of the clerks, a very nice young lady, was almost in tears over the condition of the fish that had come in as part of their most recent shipment. I hope she is still working there the next time I visit.

It's not always their faults when things go wrong, but when it is, they should have the courtesy to treat you like the valued customer you are.